What’s a good alternative to Discord and Slack?

Let’s talk about the alternatives and bring something good into focus, rather than dwell on useless negativity.

@jack Do you just use Discourse or can you suggest any others? The last time I ran a site the options were not good.

@simonwoods FWIW, a well run Discourse site is the best alternative for a forum in my opinion. Apart from working fairly well, there are a lot of sites that uses Discourse to users might already be used to using it.

It's not perfect though.

@simonwoods @jack Discourse is great, but I am uncertain how it holds up to a help/support function — I still prefer the function of one on one support via email (because you create a relationship with your people). On top, Discourse is incredibly difficult to set up by yourself (without some knowledge of servers/Ruby)… yes, one could pay of course… but maybe not the option for many, so they just go for the easiest options like Slack or Discord.

@simonwoods It’s not free, but we use Xenforo to run the forums on the IRFCA site. 10000+ members and it’s been rock solid for nearly 8 years. Great support, both official and community.

@simonwoods The only modern one I'm familiar with is Discourse. I've set up a couple of them. Lots of decent tools there.